"Best Foot Forward": Boy negotiates middle school with a prosthetic leg, a h*ng dad, a bodybuilder brother, a gay buddy, and no annoying girl-craziness

  

Link to the n*de dudes

We just dumped Peacock in favor of Apple Plus, so now we can watch Best Foot Forward (2022), based on childhood experiences of  "Paralympian, comedian, author, disability advocate, and Halloween enthusiast" Joshua Sundquist (underwear photo on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends) 

Focus character Josh has been home schooled since he lost his left leg at age nine, but he finally convinces his parents to allow him to start seventh grade in public school.  He faces the standard junior high problems of friends, math tests, soccer practice, movie night, and school dances.

Josh is played by Logan Marmino, fifteen years old in 2025 and thinking about college.  Maybe Johns Hopkins?

He's an accomplished athlete, competing in Paralympics track and high school basketball and baseball.  Plus surfing and skateboarding. 

When showrunner Joshua Sundquist invited him to audition for Best Foot Forward, he had no acting experience, not even a school play.  And he doesn't really seem interested in an acting career -- he hasn't appeared in anything since. Sports and disability activism keep him busy.

While Josh is experiencing the joys and hassles of junior high, Dad and Mom (Stephen Schneider, left, Joy Suprano) have B plots of their own, like when they tried to order two pizzas, and accidentally ordered twenty. "Sometimes older people can't see the order screen very well," the delivery guy explains, to Mom's consternation.

Stephen Schneider may be best known for a five-minute long n*de fight scene in The Righteous Gemstones, but he has 37 acting credits on the IMDB, including three tv series reviewed here: You're the Worst, Broad City. and Nobody Wants This, 

Josh's younger brother Matt (Roger Dale Floyd) mostly tries to help, or feels left out when Josh gets all of the attention.

Roger Dale Floyd, 13 years old in 2025, has appeared in The Walking Dead, Doctor Sleep, Greenland, and Stranger Things.  He is a junior bodybuilder, interested in promoting fitness among teens and tweens. 

In Greenland (2020), Roger and his Mom and Dad (Gerard Butler) must flee cross-country to safety after a comet-Apocalypse.  Whoops, they forgot to bring his insulin. 

N*de Gerard Butler on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends

Josh makes two friends, Kyle (Peyton Jackson, left) and Gabriella (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss).

Peyton Jackson has 14 acting credits on the IMDB, most recently Pet Investigators (2025), about three teens who crack a pet-theft ring.  The baddies are played by former teen idols Sean Astin, David Faustino, and Corin Nemec, and the hunk by Mike Markoff (on RG Beefcake and Boyfriends).

I have bad luck with junior high and high school comedies.  They invariably present their male characters as absurdly girl crazy, their every action designed to meet, impress, or win Girls! Girls! Girls!: "Let's join chess club -- there will be girls there!  Let's buy a new skateboard -- we can use it to get girls!  Let's jump out of an airplane -- maybe a girl will see us!"

I'm reviewing the "School Dance" episode with my "heteronormative erasure!" complaints ready.

Review after the break

"Love, American Style": I Will Defend Your Right to Shine

Love, American Style (1969-74)  aired when I was in grade  school and junior high, late on Friday nights, when my parents were already in bed and I was watching tv with my sleepover friends or my brother, loggy and yawning, eating enormous dishes of ice cream, feeling very grown-up and somewhat mischievous. 

It was an anthology, with three humorous stories every week, all somehow related to "finding love" (all heterosexual love, of course, but who knew that anything else existed?). 

Some of the episodes were actually dramas rather than comedies ("Love and the Ledge").  Some were paranormal or science fiction  ("Love and the Vampire".  Some were only tangentially related to romance.

Sex was hinted at ("Love and the Coed Dorm"),but no one actually did the deed.  This was at heart a conservative show, aimed at an audience that was home on Friday nights -- old people and kids, both confused and disturbed by this new world of sexual freedom, longing for the old days of "true love's first kiss."

No beefcake -- at least, none that I remember.  An occasional cute guy, like teen idol Kurt Russell or Ronnie Howard of The Andy Griffith Show, but mostly oldsters. like Charles Nelson Reilly (from Lidsville) and Paul Lynde (from Bewitched).

Wait -- both of those actors were gay.

Stuart Margolin (top photo) starred in risque interstitial gag pieces,  chasing secretaries around desks or trying to glimpse a bit of cleavage.

But there was some buddy-bonding, guys working together to acquire something of value or evade an enemy, with the "finding love" tacked on at the end so the story would fit the premise. One stands out in my mind:

The guy is afraid of girls, so he asks his buddy to hide in the closet and offer advice during the date. To explain why he is going into the closet so often, he brings out items that he wants to show the girl: a bowling ball, a tennis racket, skiis -- until the apartment is full of junk.  The girl expected sex, not an episode of Hoarders, so she gets up to leave.  Then the guy kisses her,and they get engaged.

Get it: he keeps going into the closet to meet a man.  And he keeps coming out of the closet with masculine-coded sporting equipment, to show the girl that he's really interested in...well, that's about as far as they could go on prime time television in the cold winter of 1972.

I'm only thinking of the gay symbolism now, of course.  When I was in grade school and junior high, what mattered was feeling warm and safe but also dangerous, glimpsing a world built for someone else, an outsider who somehow belonged.

On a star spangled night, my love,
You can rest you head on my shoulder.
And by the dawn's early light, my love,
I will defend your right to shine.